I Spent Last Night Sleeping in a Chair At Mother Brown’s
I spent last night sleeping in a chair at Mother Brown’s Dining Room at the United Council of Human Services.
I went there to see for myself the depth of the City’s neglect for my homeless neighbors in Bayview. San Francisco currently doesn’t provide any homeless shelter beds in Bayview, despite having at least 1,200 homeless residents. Mother Brown’s offers meals twice a day and chairs in the evening, but they’re not allowed to have beds for people to sleep. After 12 hours in an uncomfortable chair, with lights glaring and a TV blaring overhead, I had very little rest and a stiff back. But dozens of other men and women with me in the same room do this every single night.
I was homeless briefly during my college years, for about a month. My father died homeless, on the corner of 1st and Mission Streets, on the morning of February 1, 1984. I don’t mention my history because it’s unique, I mention it because it is common. Every reader of this article likely has experience with the multiple traumas of homelessness, either their own or with someone they know. Don’t we want those experiences to end, for everyone in our communities?
There’s nothing revelatory, nothing life-changing, about spending a single night in a homeless shelter. There are no long conversations- it’s being around people who are focused on day-to-day survival.
Mother Brown’s Dining Room is a shelter by necessity — it was never designed to be one. So in practice, it feels like something along the lines of a warm jail or a dull church. Long long ago in college-protest days, I spent a few hours at the Palo Alto jail, and the concrete and linoleum of Mother Brown’s reminded me of that time, with the crucial differences of an attentive staff, showers and laundry, and an accessible door to the outside world 30 feet away. I’ve also been in small churches in converted storefronts over the years, and the concrete and linoleum of those buildings work in a resonant, but slightly different way, to provide a bare minimum level of protection for yourself and your thoughts for a short time before sleep.
Maybe if you’re lucky, you can focus some of your thoughts for the next day.
My thoughts went to the events of the past few days, and an even stronger moral imperative for our public policy. On Sunday night, San Francisco police assisted ICE (in apparent violation of our Sanctuary City laws) to clear a civil occupation of 440 Washington Street, arresting dozens of people and taking their belongings. On Monday morning, a Latinx-led community coalition protested at the Salesforce building on Mission Street, against the company’s contract with US Customs and Border Protection and their profit-taking from the imprisonment of children. And tomorrow, we are seeing the inauguration of a new Mayor who has floated plans to force homeless citizens into conservatorship and into huge encampments on the waterfront — sites that can’t help but look like internment camps in wartime or FEMA camps after natural disasters. Our government’s treatment of refugees, from abroad and at home, is an unnatural disaster, created out of combined failures of markets and policy.
There is at least one way to begin to get relief from this disaster, by voting in November 2018.
Our City, Our Home is a new, brilliantly designed ballot measure from the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco; the Coalition just turned in thousands of signatures yesterday to get onto the November ballot. It proposes to tax the annual revenue of a small number of the City’s wealthiest corporations — the beneficiaries of Proposition 13 and the recent Trump tax cuts. Our City, Our Home claims a small portion of that wealth for our biggest need: finally supporting and housing thousands of homeless neighbors every year and providing the mental health services and eviction protections to prevent homelessness. It’s great public policy and so long overdue that it had to come from a popular initiative petition rather than from City Hall.
When I got home from Mother Brown’s at 5 this morning, I immediately fell asleep for three hours in my own bed before writing this. Of the dozens of men and women at Mother Brown’s last night, no one else had that privilege. That has to change, immediately and forever. Please vote this November, to end homelessness for thousands of San Franciscans every year and for more love and justice in Bayview.
Thank you to Gwendolyn Westbrook and Arieann Harrison of the United Council of Human Services, and the entire staff and volunteers at Mother Brown’s Dining Room, for serving me and everyone else last night and every night.